Thursday, 10 November 2016

Data16 - Keep it simple stupid by Chris Love

Keep it simple stupid

“Our world is unbounded by complexity”. Tolomy was living at a time of rapid development and built up an enourmous amount of data. He looked at the data and he mapped planetary movements. But he had the earth at the centre of the movement. It made sense.

The helio-centric model made more sense but faced more significant challenges due to the challenges to the culture this theory made.

Sankeys
Made originally but an engineer captain Sankey to look at steam power and energy loss throughout the process of a steam engine.
Minard’s Napolean’s march into Russia is probably the first that is largely used and most infamous

Sankeys are tough to build in Tableau. There are a lot of steps and a lot of techniques. Chris uses the example of Pablo’s Spanish migration and how a basic set of small multiple histogram show up the trends a lot more clearly

It's not just Pablo. A lot of people have used and built a lot of sankeys. It's not wrong but is it the best way to achieve what you are trying to achieve.

Chris highlights Joe Radburn as he is looking at complex subjects but is visualising them simply. This is arguable just a challenging skill to master.

Kuhn - new discoveries are only made when you don't have a preconception as to what the answer is and the best tool to achieve that preconception. Only exploration will lead to discovery.

Data sources should allow people to explore for themselves, or dashboards to let them answer their curiosity, story points are heavily guided.

Design for mobile is making us think more simply about the message we are trying to convey.